I might go from where I am standing in the kitchen, the faint afternoon light falling edgeways through the clouds and windowpane to pool around my feet, out into the yard with my daughter, who is still a baby, sitting in her bouncing chair. I would place the chair beside the bench and sit, taking in the overwhelming light and rancid smell of the Bradford pear blossoms heralding the dawn of spring even earlier than the budding peach. I could say, in such a moment, that the light is scattering through the tree, a million luminous waves magnified by delicate white, the petals open and stamens ejecting like fine, marmoreal hands to touch the slowly moving air and draw the mating bee. But this would not be strictly correct, for the light does not cascade upon the tree, rippling in torrents and dashing apart in floods throughout its branches. No—the tree itself, and more specifically its flowers, is the source of the light. It burns outward a thousand tapers in the slow cavalcade to summer and sheds its rays in profligate largess. Even on the brightest late-winter days, the pale-green-speckled white of its flaming shines brighter than the sky, which is its backdrop, and one wonders if they shine with the same light, which is not in fact the light of the sun but the one light that is shining through the sun and through the sky and the pear’s blossoms and its leaves. They are all distillates, extracts of this greater, supracosmic light that is never seen in its essence but known everywhere in its correspondences, its refractions of branch and anther, calling to the bees and to the eye.
Such thoughts might drift through me as I sit in the dullish light of the late-winter afternoon, the coos of my daughter floating up and mixing with the offensive smell of the Bradford pear, an image of which remains in the periphery of one’s vision long after one has gone away. It remains, beckoning and flaming. And the clouds drift evenly above, passing shadows on the world below, where invisible, athesphaton structures manifest themselves in pyramidal space, but have their origins beyond space, into which they peer to grant us a look into the greater world, the depths of the pond upon which we stretch and heave our water-skimmer bodies, gliding along what seems to us an impenetrable surface. But those greater beings, unconstrained as they are by any smallness of eye or limb, pierce the limits of our vision and stretch luxuriantly throughout the depths, showing here and there a curve of finger suffused with otherworldliness.
Could I but wake up, but turn away from the narrow dream and the catacombs and see, I might plunge and breathe the true air, and hear the true music. The cooing of my daughter would not be just the pleasant voice of love, but its very soul, and the blue sky would be rent, and the stars would fall, for I would see the true stars; I would see the real blue of the real sky, and not just its furthest surface. If I could turn from the contemplation of outer things, the most marginal of peripheries, to the pulsing wind that beats in the hearts of the earth, the grass, the passing clouds, and roars with glistening teeth the diamond essence of a greater will—breaks and shatters the hollow to build the vessel filled, casting up the sparks and making them to burn the fallen stalks lying ochre on the ground—if I could tear the thick pleats of fabric that bury me and make my breath hot and suffocating, I might throw off the burdens of the flesh, the embarrassment of being in the world, and move along the avenues of earth with grace, my soul yet lighter than my steps.
But do I have the heart to bear it, or do I slip again into the reek? The floating smell that, should the mind be drawn to it exclusively, could blind one’s eyes and make this tree, a revelation, but one more object of disgust, which comes to color every image that I see within my purview. The oleanders have not yet bloomed, but I would anticipate the creamy pinks and whites mostly with a mind of the plant’s venomous qualities, and I think of ways to keep the falling leaves from where my toddler plays.
I would look at the ants that travel through wide and verdant places, through dry stones and dead wood in search of life, and I would not see the symbol of industriousness, but the marching of a creature filled with brutality, set on domination and murder. For I know these ants, these Argentine ants, and their ways. I have heard of these South American hordes and their hundreds and thousands of queens laying eggs in fervent determination to conquer, to kill. Each young warrior, each new life a weapon in the hands of the collective, one small finger aimed at the limbs of the enemy, which shall be torn to shreds and consumed like tinder. A life means nothing to them, their own or another’s, for they ceaselessly breed and seek resource. I have known them in the spaces behind the molding, under the cabinets, swarming thick as living carpet upon the door to the trash can. I touched them once before I realized and knew I touched not a million individuals but one single body, one being that paid me absolutely no mind even as I burned away portions of it with clove and cinnamon oil. It could have laughed or smiled at me if it had been capable of mirth. But it is not; it knows nothing but growth, but breeding, pulling apart, building, always, always building and caring nought for human boundaries, which it passes as the thinnest edge of a knife passes through flesh unmindful of its course. This creature, eating the young of the conquered, builds empires complete with infrastructure, often made from the bodies of itself, an unending flow of slaves. They rampage and die unnoticed as the cells of our bodies die unnoticed. Its tunnels stretch for miles; they grow like fungus beneath my home’s foundation. They crawl through my walls and emerge in the corners of the window above the shower. Its eyes could be everywhere.
And so my property would become the place of paranoia and competition. It is the plants poisoning the air with their sickly breath, or the ants seeking to dominate the soil, to cultivate my trees with the pestilence of aphids and crawl through the joints of my home. And I do not see the gentle pinks of the oleander bloom or the ingenuity of the ant, who makes bridges and rafts of herself and her sisters. I do not see the light pouring from the pear tree, the new blushing of the peach’s buds.
But I might, I hope, look again upon the trees and again upon the ants. For one can only see horror where there is beauty marred. Is the fascination of ugliness the beauty that is being distorted? Is it that even in the most decrepit, corrupt, vile, uncaring, there is a faint gleam that lends itself to this horror and makes it to shine in the imagination, a faint vestige of something only half known in the midst of this decay? The world is being eaten away; it is burning always. This is not the question, but rather, Does the burning point beyond itself? The timber of reality is dry—it cannot bear the heat that fills it. But is there hope for a new world, one in which the branches and the buds, the ants and the aphids, will be strong enough to bear it, and to bear each other without war?